On Fridays we like to share writing tips and tricks with our readers. We hope this section will encourage and inspire you to continually improve as a writer.

Tip – Educate Yourself

Writers sometimes overlook the importance of being knowledgeable on many different topics. Your characters are not all going to have the same interests as you. They will be unique people with their own hobbies, scholarly backgrounds and upbringing. As you are developing your characters, do some research on Wikipedia or another encyclopedic source. Pick something you know nothing about and learn about it. This will help you create deeper more meaningful characters.

Prompt – Embrace Rewriting

During the editing process, writers sometimes get locked into the text they have already written even if there is a better way to express the ideas on the page. This week, take the opportunity to take what you have already written, or something new, and completely rewrite it. You will want to keep the same meaning of the text, but use different words and sentence structure to accomplish what the previous text did. This exercise will help keep your mind limber and open to the opportunity that some rewrites may offer your work.